Catholic Presbyterian

In the modern evangelical church in America there are vast differences on what is considered to be "good worship" and what is not. Usually the "good worship" is distinguished from not so good, or even "bad worship", by the subjective affinities and predilections of the individual in conjunction with how they feel both during and after they leave public worship. As if this wasn't alarming enough, lets examine one of the widely held presuppositions or axioms of the American evangelical: personal autonomy. I will stipulatively define personal autonomy here in this way: The right to have the final word regarding what is biblical and how its to be understood and applied in the faith and life of the church. This is a truly democratic and individualistic approach, sadly it is also a radically unbiblical one. Since the average person in the pew does not actually have any ecclesiastical authority to implement their opinions upon every other "personally autonomous" worshipper in the Church, this ideology usually manifests itself in the modern fad of church shopping. You know the routine keep going from church to church until you find the one the one that most closely matches up with your idea of how you think things ought to be. I call this the wandering-one-man-magesterium-minstrel approach...mouthful huh? The ironic part of the story is that while all of this is in attempts to be free from tradition and inventions of men the average American evangelical just runs from one system of man made inventions to another. In an attempt to escape traditional or liturgical forms of worship that are supposedly dead or devoid of the Spirit, the average Christian is accepting that which is most culturally familiar to them and that which makes them feel good and is supposedly free of "tradition". Well Christians...somebody had to break the news to you sooner or later, so it might as well happen now...your service of worship at your local Church is most likely filled with traditions, all though they may only be traditions stemming back to the reformation, or the 20th century, or the so-called contemporary traditions(which is funny because its usually about 10-15 years behind the tide of the culture that people are in the other 6 days of the week), they are nonetheless traditions. Sadly these newer traditions often take there cues more from the affinities of the Church community, or perhaps a select few "staff" or members of the "worship team", and not the affinities or the expressed commands of the one being Worshiped, namely our Covenant God. All churches have a Liturgy, or way of ordering worship. Going to a so-called contemporary church one will be hard pressed to go in week after week and find little if any deviation from the previous weeks service regarding the order of worship. So the question naturally arises then... have you really escaped tradition? No! You have most likely substituted one set of traditions for the other based merely on your feelings at worse and your biblical convictions at best. This is the heart of sectarianism, the cancer of the Church. We must get back to the Bible and the Historic understandings of what worship is all about, or we will continue to run the risk of becoming like the folks that Paul was addressing in 1 Cor. 11:17-20, divisive Christians that aren't really practicing the true, Spirit filled, sacrificial and communal Worship of the Church. That is not freedom friends, that is bondage to our own concupiscent desires for personal autonomy, before the peace and unity of the Body of Christ, which is sin.